Another Italian authority

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

Reference books certainly serve a purpose, but rarely is that purpose pleasure. So imagine my surprise when I sat down to thumb through Gillian Riley’s new “The Oxford Companion to Italian Food” and wound up reading straight through the letter C before I looked up. Of course, part of this book’s appeal for me is my still-rampant Italophilia. I got a bad case of it back in the 1980s and am still in its thrall. But mostly it’s the sheer joy of reading a good, spunky writer who really knows what she’s talking about.

In truth, Riley -- a member of the late Alan Davidson’s Oxford Symposium collective of passionate amateur historians -- does concentrate much more on the cultural context of Italian cooking than she does specific recipes. But she has a telling eye for the key ingredient or technique. And she writes like a good cook. Her analysis of various cookbook writers’ use of chile in spaghetti con aglio e olio is deft and knowing.

Riley’s appreciations of the too-often-derided 19th century cookbook writer Pellegrino Artusi and his 20th century counterpart Ada Boni are fine and nuanced. Both played important roles not only in Italian cuisine, but also in building a coherent Italian identity: Riley points out the role Artusi’s “La Scienza in Cucina e l’Arte di Mangiar Bene” had in establishing the Tuscan dialect as the default national language. “Artusi’s book made a greater contribution to the unification of Italy than all the efforts by politicians and linguists,” she writes. To make her points, Riley is equally comfortable pulling entries from Bartolomeo Scappi, the 16th century cookbook author, and Andrea Camilleri, the great modern detective writer.

Riley is a master of the pithy observation. Consider her entry on Italian cookbooks: “[They] are used more in Italy today than they were in the past. Until recently, women learnt to cook, and men to criticize and evaluate, from their mothers and grandmothers.”

“The Oxford Companion to Italian Food,” by Gillian Riley. Oxford University Press, $35.

-- Russ Parsons